Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Sony’s upcoming products which are posed to challenge Apple’s beloved iPhone and the “revolutionary” iPad.  The article explained that while Sony had a rocky past and mixed success with both its cell phone and gaming divisions, its newest portable devices are meant to offer solid competition to Apple’s iTunes-powered gadgets. Though it will be interesting to learn about what Sony comes up with, it’s likely the technology will be playing catch-up with Apple’s offerings. Why? Because the Cupertino giant has early innovation advantage on its side.

While some will argue that Apple’s gizmos are simply superior, I think the company’s strength comes from its ability to revolutionise a product. For example, Apple has transformed the smartphone from a complicated device into a tool that’s fun and easy to use. It’s trying to do the same with tablet computing, providing an engaging and simple option with the iPad. Being the first company to properly market the concept guarantees that competitors’ alternatives will appear to be copying Apple.

Lessons Learnt

It’s clearly becoming more and more important for companies to be the first to innovate. This concept isn’t justapplicable on a product development level- in fact, it’s quite relevant in most business areas. Innovation can be the key to opening the doors to success. Unfortunately, many companies aren’t willing to take risks and explore the unknown, particularly when a mistake could cause a serious impact on profits. Luckily, there’s an opportunity for businesses to experiment with innovation in a minimal risk environment: social media.

Businesses have been slowly embracing Twitter as their main venture into the world of social media. Statistics show that Twitter has become the most popular and most utilised venue for companies, so having an account is no longer something new. Now, it’s important to have an innovative approach to Twitter and to develop a strategy which differentiates from the competition.

Twitter is a versatile platform which can be used to creatively interact with both current and potential customers. As added bonus, it’s relatively new and has yet to be fully explored. Some companies have already found fresh and interesting Twitter approaches. Best Buy heavily advertises its twelpforce customer service Twitter account. Dell has earned millions by running special promotions for its Twitter followers.  Part of what allowed these companies to succeed was the fact that they were among the first to try their respective strategies. Fortunately, there are still many ignored opportunities for businesses on Twitter. In order to profit from social media, it’s important to bring something new to the table early on.

The Importance of Early Innovation is a post from: Tamar

The Wall Street Journal revealed more details about Twitter’s monetisation plans. According to insiders, Twitter will be launching ‘Google-style’ sponsored ads around its search results.

Brands have expressed mixed feelings about the news. According to the trade journal, Marketing, some brands, like Virgin Media, see it as an excellent way to harness the power of the platform. While others, such as Honda, are less convinced. In my opinion the Honda’s of the world are smart to take the wait and see approach. How exactly will things be priced and what will the search volumes be? And, how will Twitter make its SERP less spammy and more relevant to brand searches?

Twitter’s plans strengthen my colleague Neilson Hall’s assertion that the  future is social search integrated with natural search.  Consumers are less inclined to ‘trust’ paid ads outside of Twitter. Isn’t it likely they’ll feel the same way within the Twittersphere?

A part of me thinks that using Twitter ads alone are a lazy and ineffective way for brands to engage with the Twitter community. Invest the resources to establish a presence and nurture your relationships with the advocates that will naturally gravitate to your brand profile. If your brand has a strong presence on Twitter your messaging would be spread naturally through tweets by your followers and Retweets of your content.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter’s Google-like strategy is the right move? And are brands taking the easy way out by paying to engage with the community?

The Googlization of Twitter is a post from: Tamar

Well one of the largest blogging services, Wordpress, recently announced a significant upgrade to their systems in the form of PubSubHubub. What this means is that now, instead of RSS readers like Google having to constantly ‘ask’ your blog if it has any new content – Wordpress will ‘push’ the content to the reader.

Why is this a big deal?

Until now it has been difficult to get blogs to the real-time standard as they are checked at intervals requiring network traffic and system resources (all be it not very much) and it could be up to a few hours before your blog traversed the ether into your subscribers’ hands. Now this should be instant (within a few seconds).

The demo shown below deemed ‘cheesey’ by Wordpress themselves illustrates the point and highlights the importance of this change.

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This back end upgrade only works if you have your blog hosted on Wordpress.com and not your own domain. If you have your own domain and host a Wordpress blog, you can download a plugin which gives your blog the same functionality and has it’s own built in hub. Zero configuration needed.

This is an important move in the direction of real-time content delivery for bloggers and is another interim step while a new standard deployment method is established.

Wordpress ‘pushes’ blogs into real-time is a post from: Tamar

Speech recognition technology is terribly difficult when you take into account the number of varied accents each language is spoken in. As we sometimes have difficulty deciphering what one another are saying it’s easy to imagine the trouble a machine would have doing this! To be successful in achieving this with computers one has to take a step back from the recognised ways in which we develop software systems.

It’s this step that gives way to the most exciting element of this system for me: the development of learning technology. Both the speech recognition and translation components have to learn from previous uses to make them useful and accurate, which is why I’m so optimistic that Google will be successful when they bring out their software in a couple of years.

Their speech recognition component is already available in the nexux one smartphone in the form of sms and email dictation and web search queries. The system records a voice input and sends it to Google’s speech recognition servers to transcribe. Part of the reason this component can be so successful is that the nature of mobile phones makes them personal to almost exclusively one user. The phone should therefore be able to improve its prediction of what you’re saying according the way in which you’ve spoken in the past.

Google also have an advantage with their translation software as it can combine the more basic elements of such systems, like algorithms for grammatical construction with its database of translated websites and documents. As with the recognition element the more information that can be collated for translation, the better the quality will be.

It’s this abundance of information that’s available to Google that makes me think they may just  achieve this fantastic goal. Although a number of experts believe this to be an impossible task with current technology I’m sure that Google are well placed to overcome the impossibilities, besides isn’t it always the impossible ideas that drive technology forward?

Google’s Babelfish is a post from: Tamar

Long awaited Site Verification Sharing
I couldn’t be happier to hear that Google added a long waited feature to their Webmaster Tools Site Verification process. Previously if more than one person needed to be a verified owner each person had to go through the drama of the meta tag or html tag verification process.  Now you don’t have to endure the same grueling verification process but more users can be added by existing verified site owners.

Make sure you read these  important notes before you go ahead and use the updated site verification feature.

Say no to hacking and site abuse
Google is taking a further step in the fight against hackers and spammers. Last year November Google announced that they would add notifications about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help site owners to better protect their websites.

The latest roll-outs of these notifications provides alerts about suspicious acitivy or potential hacking as well as steps on how to get the site fixed and back into Google’s SERPs.

Starting this month the notifications sent to the Message Center could include:
- Spammy or abused user-generated content
- Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
- Suspected hacking acitivities.

Who doesn’t love Google Webmaster Tools?

Google webmaster tools loves site managers is a post from: Tamar

Digg.com reported that “from a revenue perspective, things have been great.” Advertisers have been jumping at the chance to engage in more fulfilling interaction with users. Digg has truly created something revolutionary by forcing companies to create advertisements which are meant to be viewed as interesting social media.

The Digg ad model captures the versatility of social media as a complementary tool in pretty much any area. It’s highly likely that Twitter’s future attempt at monetization will involve something very similar- a platform which allows users to interact with advertisers, allowing them to learn from one another. I look forward to seeing how more and more companies end up using social media in their advertising campaigns.

If you spotted that I’m a new face on the Tamar blog, you’re right! I’m a student from Boston University in the US, and am spending a few months interning at Tamar. I’m a huge fan of social media and its many applications and am fortunate to be able to help Tamar develop its social media offerings. Having spent some time working with US organizations on their social outreach efforts, I’m excited to explore the field from a British perspective!

Advertising + Social Media = ♥ is a post from: Tamar

Internet Explorer logo

The ECC’s case has been running since 2008 and Microsoft finally signed on the dotted line on 16 December to offer alternative browsers from 1 March. The case was made to break up Microsoft’s dominance of the web browser market, and also encourage choice and innovation for users. Internet Explorer is still just in the lead among web surfers in Europe according to statistics from Statcounter. They have 45.4 per cent of the market share, followed by Mozilla Firefox at 39.3 per cent, with Google Chrome trailing with just 6.4 per cent.

Users in Europe who are running Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 will be presented with a “choice screen” with five choices, as part of a Windows Update. These will be Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Opera.

Windows users now have the option to choose their favourite browser is a post from: Tamar

For those unfamiliar with the term white space, here is what Wikipedia have to say about it:

“White space or whitespace refers to the blank (white) area between written characters or graphic regions.” – Wikipedia

This is a fundamental aspect of design and yet one that can sadly be all-too-often overlooked. Below are some examples, click the image to go to the site in question.

Common misconceptions:

White space is wasted space – absolutely not. While content should be the focus of the design, the amount of content and the effect of the content needs to be carefully balanced. Some of the most important content can be given a greater impact by letting it sit in a minimal design. The layout and design should be appropriate for the content.

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White space has to be white – not really, white space is a general term given to the area between more prominent design elements which, really, can be on any background so long as it does not intrude on the layout. The importance is the space between elements. Imagery can become part of the deisgn.

A great example of a bold design and still respecting white space (or in this case greyspace)

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White space means minimal – ou contraire. While minimal design does use a lot of white space, you can in fact show a lot of content if the design uses white space effectively in an easily understandable way.

Below is an example of a layout with a lot of content but due to the spacing it seems entirely manageable. Below are all my unread RSS feeds (over 1000 as Google keeps reminding me) and my Twitter stream combined into an easily digestible layout. This is called Feedly and is available as a plugin for Firefox and Chrome. It illustrates the point beautifully that a lot of content can also look good if spaced correctly.

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Other good examples of large amounts of content in a good layout are design blogs. They are updated several times daily, have a myriad of sections as well as advertising so need to be able to accommodate large quantities of content and still be manageable by the reader. Smashing Magazine and Fubiz are two great examples.

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Some basic do’s and don’ts of white space:

Do – use even spacing and alignment for effective placement of elements

Don’t – necessarily use even spacing, use appropriate spacing. For example when pairing headings to content, the content should be biased towards the heading with a noticeable, if subtle, grouping.

For example, comments. In the following example you either have to scroll to the top or bottom to see whether the poster’s name is aligned to the top or bottom of a comment.

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If the alignment was made more obvious with uneven spacing, it becomes a lot clearer.

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Do – use imagery to aid the design and add a focal point.

Don’t – use an image just to fill a space

Do – show the appropriate amount of content

Don’t – add all the content, just because there is space too. If there is more content that you need to add then consider rewriting parts to more concisely and succinctly convey your message.

The bottom line is that design aids content – be it a one word message or a thousand page document,

“design without content is decoration” – Zeldman

An understanding of white space and spacing in general means an understanding of the positional aesthetic, even clutter can look good.

If there’s one thing to remember about white space is that it is not simply the absence of content. It is the subtle (and all-too-often overlooked) spacing that aids good design.

The wonderous (and sometimes forgotten) world of white space is a post from: Tamar

Similarities

• Both essentially follow the same model – figure out where you are, tell you what’s nearby and reward you for sharing your experience.
• Both run very slickly on the iPhone, and both are available (though to a less-sexy extent) on other mobile devices too, as well as through their websites.
• Both allow you to post updates to your friends on Twitter and Facebook, whether it be your location or ‘achievements’ you’ve received.
• Both were developed in the US, though Foursquare *seems* to have cracked the UK market a bit more quickly.
• As they become more popular, both seem to be falling foul of inexperienced new players creating multiple copies of the same spot – a bit of a pain, particularly in built-up areas.

Differences

• Despite the obvious opportunities, only Foursquare seems to make it easy for businesses to add offers and ‘rewards’ – you can visit the Foursquare Business Page to submit an offer for your business, just like Sams, the restaurant next to Tamar HQ recently did. I suspect Gowalla has business deals going on, particularly for their ‘featured spots’, but it’s not very obvious how a small business would go about doing this.
• Gowalla LOOKS a lot nicer than Foursquare – the lovingly designed icons and interface on Gowalla knock the industrial-looking interface of Foursquare in to a very big cocked-hat. As a fan of another AlamoFire application, Packrat (see my previous blog post on the game here), I can see they put the same artistic geniuses from that game to work on Gowalla, and it really pays off.
• Only Gowalla lets you categorize your spots – Foursquare simply lists spots nearby, meaning unless the creator has kindly listed what they actually ARE in the description, it can be a confusing mess at times. Gowalla on the other hand breaks spots down in to any of almost 100 categories, with beautiful icons giving you an at-a-glance guide to what is what.
• Foursquare’s ‘rewards’ are a lot more straightforward, though a little bit less fun if you’re a collector like me. A series of badges show you what achievements you have gotten, and what you have left to get. Gowalla uses objects which you can drop, pick-up and vault to make the task a bit more interesting, though badges aren’t available.
• Gowalla also gives you ‘trip‘ functionality – the ability to set up collections of spots in a certain theme, which you are them rewarded for completing. For example, the closest ‘trip’ to me is the grandly-title ‘London Championship Chase‘ – a collection of 5 famous sporting venues in London, which you can work your way through. It might be considered silly to some, but in my opinion it adds another element to the app/game.
• Proximity – this one is a crucial one for me, but maybe I’m just anal like that? With Gowalla you can only ‘check in’ to a spot when you are within 200m of the spot – whereas with Foursquare, the radius is a LOT bigger. What this basically means is it’s a lot easier to cheat with Foursquare, and say you’re somewhere when you’re not. Whilst this can be a little buggy at times (it relies after all on the creator of the spot having created it in the right place, which often they don’t) I think it makes much better use of the GPS element of the app.

Conclusions

Annoyingly, I’ve still not really made up my mind – and plan to continue to use both until I do. What I can say though is that for a BUSINESS, Foursquare offers a lot more opportunities to monetize the app in some very interesting ways. It’s review functionality is also a lot stronger, making it crucial to keep an eye on what users are saying about your business, as with all social media. But for a user, a lot of what you get out of the two apps will be, like social networks, dependant on which of your friends are using each one. So at the end of the day, it’ll probably be another case of survival of the fittest – or most popular – for these two babies.

Gowalla vs Foursquare – Battle of the apps! is a post from: Tamar

According to new reports, next month Twitter will be launching an ad platform to make some money (finally!).  The first generation of Twitter ads will apparently appear as hashtagged messages in users’ streams.

Details aren’t exactly clear at the moment.

Interestingly, Twitter’s head of monetization indicated in an interview that they wouldn’t be in control of ads per se — they’re going to provide a platform that people can innovate around and publishers (I assume he means us Tweeters) the choice of what ads go out.   Furthermore, they aren’t looking to control how the ad tweets will be viewed/consumed.

Here’s my theory on what I think they’re going to do.

I think Twitter is planning on making money (commission?) by brokering deals between brands and people (or organizations) with a high number of engaged followers.

They’ve studied the Twittersphere and its Tweple.  Through an analysis of tweets, followers, followings, Biz and Ev’s team have probably drawn up a list of the most ‘monetizeable’ among its 70 million account holders.

If my theory is correct, it looks like Twitter has accepted that if it wants to make any money at all, it will have to share its profits with others.

When you join Twitter, there isn’t a default Twitter account that you are required to follow.  So, there isn’t a way to ‘force’ a an official Twitter ‘tweet’ in to the streams of everyone in the Twittersphere.   They’ll need ‘publishers ‘ to help them get advertising messages out.

Also, the fact that many people access Twitter through APIs has probably ruled out a lot of ad sales options for them as well.

If you have a Twitter account, brush up your content and start engaging with people in the Twitterverse to grow your following.

In my opinion, people/organizations with engaged, huge followings will be the real winners of Twitter monetization.

Twitter Monetization: Who’ll be the Real winner? is a post from: Tamar